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I recently had the great pleasure of attending the Dearne Valley Archaeology Day (DVAD) 2014 conference, which was organised by Elmet Archaeology and the Dearne Valley Archaeology Group, in Wath upon Dearne, South Yorkshire. As readers of this blog may be aware that I recently posted my own abstract for the talk (here), which focused on the value of blogging archaeology and introduced this blog to members of the public as well as to archaeologists and historians. It was certainly a first for me to talk at a conference, and I had never thought that I’d actually be talking to an audience about blogging and my own site, but it just goes to show you never quite know where blogging will take you.

Kate Adelade‘s archaeological illustration stall. Kate has previously wrote about cannibalism for this blog here.

The event was well attended and included a great range of speakers who covered a variety of topics in the archaeology and heritage areas. As well as the speakers (a full list can be viewed here), there were also stalls on a number of projects from around the local area. Jennifer Crangle, a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield, was present as well with her stall on the medieval Rothwell Charnel Chapel project (of which I’ve previously discussed here) and Kate Adelade had her modern presentation displaying her fantastic archaeological illustration skills on show. In fact I was quite impressed by each and every speaker at the day long conference, especially by the different styles and approaches that they all took. I also learnt a great deal about various projects around the UK and further abroad. Humour, as I discovered, really can help a talk a great deal too. David Connolly, of BAJR and Past Horizons fame, really proved this during his animated talk about the Scottish hillforts (or rather ramped and ditched enclosures of unknown date and function) in the Lothians, as part of the on-going Rampart Scotland project. David’s talk focused on the Iron age site of Sheriffside for his talk, and the great work that him and his team of volunteers underwent to target viable radiocarbon samples to help phase the site.

There were some great talks on community projects too, such as Mercian Archaeological Services CIC on-going Sherwood Forest Archaeological Project and a nice little round up of the great work that Elmet Archaeology have so far conducted in South Yorkshire. Elmet further whetted the audience’s appetites by highlighting some future projects as well, including the investigation of a WW2 POW camp at Hickleton Hall, near Doncaster, which promises to be pretty interesting in unearthing the physical remains of a legacy of war.

There were also talks that really grabbed my imagination in the size and scale of their ambitions and detail. The first was by Victoria Donnelly, a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford, that focused on her research on the grey literature of the archaeological record. This is a part of the fascinating EngLaId project, which aims to characterise and explore the extent of the archaeological landscape in England by studying English archaeology from 1500BC to AD1086. Victoria focused her talk on her own research into the grey literature and, with the use of GIS magic (Geographical Information Systems), provided some great examples highlighting the focus of commercial archaeological investigations. Who, for instance, knew that, in England, Suffolk County Council are one of the bigger archaeological researchers in England? I certainly didn’t and it was an eye opening presenting into the mystery of the oft maligned grey literature that all archaeological investigations produce.

Of a particular interest to me, due in part as of having studied in Sheffield itself, was Andrew Whitham’s talk on the Sheffield General Cemetery, which was opened in 1836 to accommodate a range of burials in the burgeoning industrial city (Sayer 2010: 29). I had known about the site thanks to reading Elmet Archaeology’s own osteoarchaeologist Lauren McIntyre and University of Sheffield researcher Linzi Harvey’s 2012 survey report of the non-conformist crypt, but I had not realised the sheer size and subterranean magnificence of the site, nor of the effort in the construction of the site itself. Andrew’s magnificent talk highlighted the fact that the General Cemetery was, unfortunately, a failure of Sheffield with many residents of the burgeoning city of Sheffield not wanting to be interred in the numerous space saving crypts, and instead wanting to be interred individually in graves. The General cemetery today is a place that is well loved and respected by the city as a key piece of the history of Sheffield, and a place of recognition for understanding the changes in burial law for non-conformist burials.

As it happens I am currently reading archaeologist Duncan Sayer‘s Ethics and Burial Archaeology (2010), a fantastic Duckworth Debates in Archaeology book that focuses on contextualising the understanding how we approach buried human remains, both from a historical point of view and of an archaeology wide industry perspective. Sayer, currently a researcher at the University of Central Lancashire, has worked extensively as a field archaeologist on many of the recent post-medieval cemetery excavations in Sheffield. Indeed the Sheffield cemeteries make up a large portion of the case studies used in Ethics and Burial Archaeology and are used as examples of the troubles of trying to both understand the construction of graveyards and of understanding the now-outdated burial laws of the 19th century in a modern context. It is a must read for any archaeologist or interested member of the public to understand the unique and difficult position that the UK currently finds itself in regarding the law of excavation and retention of human remains.

But finally at DVAD we had the day double-ended by talks on the Egyptian dead by both Dr Campbell Price, of Manchester Museum, who discussed the appeal of mummies in museums and by Prof. Joann Fletcher, of the University of York, who highlighted the value of working with the non-cadaver material of mummies in both Egypt and the wider world. Both talks were eye opening regarding the practice of how the archaeology and heritage sector study and displays human remains. It was great and inspiring to see such passion and invigoration with which the results of studies carried out by Fletcher et al. were conveyed to a largely public audience.

The beginning of my own talk on blogging archaeology.

But coming back to my own talk, which was held at the beginning of the day, I have to admit that I was quite nervous before and during the start of my own talk, but you live and learn. As the talk went on I did become to feel more comfortable about the topic and of my own knowledge. However I have taken away a few points on how to improve my own public speaking, and I aim to use these to help address the issues that I faced during my own presentation at DVAD. In fact I think this would probably be a pretty good topic for a future blog post, as presenting and communicating at conferences, and at public talks, is a pretty good skill to have and a must if archaeologists are to present the importance of their research to a wider audience. There was one point in the talk that I had hoped to make but had unfortunately forgot to include it. That is that the blogging format is an evolving body of text, one that needs constant revision and refinement but is, nonetheless, one of the strengths and one of the weaknesses of the blogging format. Content, not format, is the important part of any communication, especially in the blogging world where the audience faces so many distractions at the touch of a button.

My own talk was actually influenced by the fantastic blogging carnival that Doug, of Doug’s Archaeology, carried out ahead of the SAA conference in April of this year. My own five blog entries for the carnival forced me look again at why I blog archaeology, the effect it has had for myself and for understanding the benefit of discussing the importance of the human skeletal remains in archaeology generally. I should also state here that I am extremely grateful to Kristina Killgrove (of Powered By Osteons), Doug Rocks Macqueen (of Doug’s Archaeology), Sam Hardy (of (Un)free Archaeology) and Katy Meyers (of Bones Don’t Lie) for providing quotes on why they blog, which I used in my presentation as examples of the reasons. It is these bloggers, and many others, that provide me with the inspiration to carry on blogging.

All in all I thoroughly enjoyed my day at DVAD. I met some great people, I learnt a lot and I had a wonderful time whilst doing so. I owe a big thank you to Chris, Alex and Lauren at Elmet Archaeology for all of their hard work for putting on a great conference, and here is to next years conference!

It seems that we have also entered the season of the (bio)archaeology conference. This weekend will see me attending the University of Durham Engaging with the Dead conference, and it is an event that I am particularly looking forward to. It will be two packed days of exploring changing human beliefs about the body, death and mortality over 8000 years. The event will have a particular focus on the archaeological remains of human bodies and of traces of mortuary culture in Britain and the Levant, as a part of the on-going Invisible Dead project, which is itself based at the University of Durham.

Note

The photographs here appear with the courtesy of Alex Sotheran.

Learn More

The Elmet Archaeology blog has a nice little summary of the day’s speakers along with some great photographs, read more here.

The Rampart Scotland homepage can be found here, with information on the range of hillfort sites in Scotland and the importance of these longstanding monuments in the landscape.

The EngLaID home page, the project to analyse change and continuity in the English landscape from the early Bronze Age to the Domesday survey, can be found here. The site blog also have a review of DVAD here.